iOS 11 support and notes

by Cate Butnaru

What you didn't know about iOS 11 beta 1

Launched last week at WWDC17, Apple’s new iOS 11 comes packed with upgrades and features that enable AR and complex operations being run on mobile devices. With iOS 11, Apple aims to turn iPhone and iPad into intelligent personal devices.

The Reincubate team has tried early builds of iOS 11 and discovered a few interesting changes that you probably didn’t know about from the WWDC17 announcement alone. We are sharing a bunch of these changes below, and if you are an Apple iOS data integrator or developer, you might be interested.

iOS 11 findings from under the hood

We are proud to be first to offer iOS 11 support to our API clients and support the wider Apple eco-system. We're excited by the advancements we've seen from Apple in this iteration of iOS, and expect significant new changes as Apple centralise data to flow through their hardware.

CloudKit entrypoint redesign

Apple have introduced a new endpoint architecture for CloudKit in iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra. The new structure resembles a CDN, where traffic to services is now managed by a gateway layer and not by the domain name sharing method as before. The changes do not affect access to iCloud backups yet, but will work to simplify and improve performance of iCloud services in the future.

Improved information security

Changes have been made to how sensitive file attribute data is secured in messages from CloudKit services. This means it's harder to access CloudKit files without all of the information necessary.

Enhanced file processing and compression

With the recent push to modernise their file system through APFS we can see that Apple are working to make savings in file storage and data transfer rates. In iOS 11, Apple have introduced an additional layer of processing on certain files. This reduces the size of backups and improves the speed of communication of these files between your devices and CloudKit services.

Stay updated

We are updating this entry as we go, and will add new significant findings as further iOS 11 betas become available.

In the meantime we’d like to point a few interesting threads that have started to grow in followers and interest since WWDC17.